In the online age, page/line-based quotation is obsolete
(for
current and forward-going text). Pages are and have always
been
arbitrary entities. A document's natural landmarks are
sections,
paragraphs and sentences. That is how quotations and
passages
should be cited, not by page numbers (though page numbers
can be
added in parens as a courtesy and curiosity, for continuity,
for
the time being, while pages -- and PDF -- scroll inexorably
toward their natural demise).
It goes without saying that all quotations, citations and
references should be hyperlinked. I am sure that XML
documents
will be tagged for section number, paragraph number and
sentence
number, so that it will be natural not only to pinpoint the
passage to which one wishes to refer, but to hyperlink
directly
to it.
This answers, in passing, one faint concern about the
self-archiving of authors' final refereed drafts instead of
the
published PDF: "How will I specify the location of
passages I
wish to single out or quote?" The answer is paragraph
numbers
(or, if you want to be even more precise, section numbers,
paragraph numbers and sentence spans). They have the virtue
of
not only being autonomous and ascertainable from the
document
itself, but they are independent of arbitrary pagination and
PDF.
(It will also be useful for digitometric analyses.)
(I introduced this rather trivial and obvious online
solution in
Psycoloquy http://psycprints.
ecs.soton.ac.uk/ in the early 90's,
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Thes
chat/0037.html
-- though I'm sure I wasn't the first -- and APA at last
began
recommending it in 2001:
http://media.library.ku.edu.tr/refpgs/sociology/sty
le_apa.htm )
http://w
ww.google.com/search?q=harnad+%22paragraph+number%22+&nu
m=100&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2005-09,GGGL:e
n&filter=0
Stevan Harnad
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